Sales is perhaps the fastest-moving part of any business. There’s a constant stream of new campaigns for sales reps to keep up with, and each requires new processes.
Ideally, sales teams would automate many of those processes. Because sales moves so quickly, however, teams just can’t wait for IT to implement new automations—so they’re increasingly doing it themselves. While they may eliminate some manual work, these ad-hoc automations can be tricky to execute well; they’re often not as effective as you hoped, and they’re usually not secure or governable by IT.
An easy (and governable!) way to get started with sales automation is to use Workato to connect two classic apps: Google Sheets and Salesforce. Almost every sales person uses them at some point in their career, and there are countless sales processes that span both apps. Automation allows you to simplify these processes and augment both apps’ native functionality.
At Workato, we call our automations recipes, because they’re simple sets of steps that get work done between your apps. Here are four recipes that can get you started with Salesforce-Google Sheets automation today!
Automate Lead Syncing
Leads come from lots of sources, but they often exist in a spreadsheet before they’re entered into your CRM. If you ran a booth at a conference or trade show and used a lead scanner, for example, those leads almost definitely wound up in a spreadsheet before you looked at them in Salesforce.
Many sales teams still rely on manual data entry to move those leads into Salesforce, which not only takes time but also increases the chance of errors. A simple Workato recipe can move these leads from Google Sheets into Salesforce automatically, which is a huge timesaver and allows you to start the sales cycle faster. If you have to wait for marketing or another department to get those leads into Salesforce, you’re losing precious time. The longer it takes you to follow up with a prospect, the colder the lead becomes.
Keeping Salesforce organized is also a top priority for sales teams. To prevent duplicates, this automation checks for an existing lead (using criteria like name and address) before creating a new one. This is also a Two Minute Recipe, which means you can set up this automation in less time than it takes you to make a cup of coffee!
Get started with this recipe >
Seamlessly move contact form submissions into Salesforce via Google Sheets
It’s very common for prospects to reach out to a company on their own—and they often do it online. To make it easier, many companies have a form on their website where prospects can request a quote or other assistance.
Once received, these requests still need to be forwarded to the correct account executive or sales development representative. The easiest way to do this is to move them into Salesforce and associate them with the appropriate lead.
By using Google Sheets as an intermediary between your contact form and Salesforce, you can easily attach new form submissions to the right lead in real time. New form submissions are added to the Sheet as rows; whenever a new row is added, Workato can use the email address to look for a contact in Salesforce.
If there’s already an existing contact, Workato creates custom object (such as a “Contact Us Request”) and ties it to the contact. This way, sales reps have immediate visibility into which prospects or customers have reached out for extra help.
Connect the entire customer journey for end-to-end insights
You can also use a version of these workflows to move leads from any other app directly into Salesforce—no spreadsheets needed. Workato not only allows you to map data fields between apps (so your information is always in the right format) but it also allows you to move data based on rules and conditions. You can bulk sync leads between your marketing app (like Marketo) and Salesforce, add leads to specific campaigns, and update lead information as soon as it changes!
You can even construct workflows that involve more than two apps. For example, when a new attendee registers for an event in Eventbrite, Workato can automatically create new leads in Hubspot and sync that lead with Salesforce before assigning it to the correct campaign in each app.
And these workflows aren’t just for lead triage, cleansing, and outreach; you can automatically move other key customer data—like open support tickets—into Salesforce for a 360° customer view!
Related: 3 types of marketing automation that can fuel lead management efforts
Speed Up Sales Response Times
Automatically add hot leads from Salesforce to a Google Sheet
One great Salesforce feature is the ability to mark leads as “hot.” Usually, this means that you want to follow up with them right away because they have a higher likelihood of closing.
Sometimes, however, you might want to work with those leads outside of your CRM—for personal pipeline tracking, for example, or for analytics and reporting. Many reps also prefer working with spreadsheets in certain situations, such as when they’re on-the-go.
An easy way to do this is to automatically move hot leads into a Google Sheet using Workato. Whenever a new hot lead is created in Salesforce, Workato will pick it up and add it as a new row in the Sheet.
Auto-categorize leads by company size in Google Sheets from Salesforce
Similarly, it’s important for sales teams to stay on top of large accounts. Often, these customers are handled by dedicated enterprise sales reps who specialize in working with bigger companies.
To more easily track these prospects, you can use a simple Workato recipe that starts whenever an account with more than 500 employees is added to Salesforce. Workato will create a new row in a Google Sheet and populate it with the account’s information, so you can easily track large accounts.
Stay on top of your accounts and never miss an opportunity with Slack notifications
For a modern twist on these automations, you can create a recipe that notifies you in Slack whenever a lead is marked as “hot” in Salesforce. This saves you the time of having to check a spreadsheet, and it encourages your team to use Salesforce as their hub.
You can also use Workbot, a chatbot we built to help you get work done in other apps from Slack, to manage hot leads directly from the chat console. With buttons, drop-down lists, and commands, you can request a list of all your hot leads, assign them to reps, and much more without ever leaving Slack! Workbot will securely execute all your actions in Salesforce. This way, you can manage hot leads even when your on the go, without having to worry about updating Salesforce separately.
A similar set of recipes can be used to monitor and work with large accounts from Slack. In fact, you can use Workato to set up notifications for all your leads based on size, vertical, projected close date, and many other criteria.
Related: How a sales chatbot helps your reps maximize revenue opportunities
Go beyond simple Salesforce and Google Sheets automations with Workato
These recipes are a few quick and simple ways to get started with sales automation. If you’re ready to implement more complex workflows, however, Workato can help you with those, too. Sales teams have used our platform to automatically deploy contracts, onboard new partners, and cleanse leads. At Workato, we even created a fully-automated deal desk in Slack to give our sales reps more time to sell! Every team should be looking into ways to make their sales cycle faster and more efficient – so could automation help your team?
